The story of obesity throughout human existence is an old one. From prehistoric times (35,000 bc), we have clay statuettes of obese women. Obesity is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud. The ancient Greeks, Hippocrates in particular, designated corpulence as a disease, the harbinger of other illnesses, a cause for premature mortality; they also provided a preliminary understanding of diabetes. The Dark Ages were just that, with Greek wisdom lost, and the Renaissance